#nprlife

NPR Fall 2018 Internships are live! There’s over 50 internships to choose from. The deadline to apply is Sunday, July 8, 11:59pm EST.

A good-hearted fellow mug advocate, audio engineer Andy Huether, posted this photo in a Slack channel here yesterday. That squirrel! 😍 

Andy noted: “have you attended an event or meeting in Studio 1 in the past, oh say, couple years? have you been missing a mug and/or sam adams commemorative glass for a curiously similar amount of time? perhaps these clues can be put together. perhaps you will find your mug in the 4th floor kitchen. if not, maybe they will find use holding others’ coffee and/or tea and/or cocoa and/or boston lager.”

Zazil Davis-Vazquez, Research, Archives and Data Strategy (RAD) Intern, walks us through her fangirl moment at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert yesterday.

Today I got to meet one of my favorite bands of all time.

Since the beginning of my music metadata internship in the Research, Archives and Data Strategy department (RAD), I have been working on testing the accuracy of mood-predicting algorithms that we use to categorize music for our music database, Orpheus. I also get to catalogue music that artists and promoters send to our team. Every couple of days, I have to remind my teenage self that I am literally getting paid to listen to music all day, and then I have to pinch myself because it feels like a dream!

Today was the biggest dream come true of my internship so far, however. My favorite band, Café Tacuba, came to do a Tiny Desk Concert, and I started getting nervous hours before they even got to the building. The first time I saw them play, I was eight years old and they opened for Beck at UCSD. My whole family gets together after parties and sings their songs while my uncle plays his guitar and my little cousins run around the kitchen. Needless to say, this concert was huge for me!

When they started doing soundcheck, I made my way over to the music area, and I saw Rubén Albarrán, in a beautiful blue poncho with long fringe just casually walking around, warming up his voice. Before I could even stop, I saw my hand extending in front of me to introduce myself. I was too excited for my own good, and started babbling at him in nervous Spanglish. I can’t express how sweet he was--he even asked my name and then guessed its origin and meaning perfectly (which has NEVER happened to me).

As they began to play, my eyes started to water, but I also couldn’t stop dancing and enjoying the moment. After the concert, the bassist came up to me, hugged me, and said, “You knew all the lyrics!” When they left, I floated back to my desk and got right back to cataloguing new albums. The stars aligned perfectly to give me the best day of my life and I couldn’t be more grateful. Thanks to all my co-interns who encouraged me to greet the band and listened to me nerd out with such kindness.

When we started the “Our Land” journey in January, I mentioned that I drew inspiration from the words of John Steinbeck: his notion, in the travelogue Travels with Charley, to “rediscover this monster land.”

Four months later, as we wrap up the first phase of our project, I’m turning for inspiration to another John: the naturalist, explorer and author John Muir. 

In the late 1800s, Muir took three trips to southeast Alaska, where producer Elissa Nadworny and I just spent a revelatory two weeks gathering stories. Muir traveled along the Inside Passage by steamer ship and canoe, marveling at the glaciers he watched calving into fjords, the huge girth of Sitka spruce trees, the endless, quivering light display of the aurora borealis. The scenery of coastal Alaska, Muir wrote, was “hopelessly beyond description.” But he managed, beautifully:

In these coast landscapes there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness,     such a multitude of features without apparent redundance, their lines           graduating delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all pen-work seems hopelessly unavailing. Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed. 

The guiding principle behind the “Our Land” series has been to explore how place shapes identity: how where we live shapes who we are, and how ties to the land determine our sense of self. These ideas are front and center in our most recent Alaska reporting. Among our stories, we’ll hear a father-daughter commercial fishing duo talk about making a living, and a life, on the water. We’ll hear from Alaska Natives about celebrating and revitalizing their ancient cultures, rooted in the land. And we’ll visit a tiny village – with just a post office to its name -- where living independently, off the grid, defines the people who make it their home.

Throughout our travels, I’ve been reminded time and again of people’s intense pride in where they’re from. We heard this expressed clearly by the sons of Yemeni immigrants in Hamtramck, Michigan. By a cattle broker along the Arizona-Mexico border. By Chinese-American families in the Mississippi Delta.

And it’s no small thing that on every step of our road trip, we’ve been welcomed into people’s homes and invited to share the bounty at their dinner table. We’ve gratefully shared in a community potlatch in Klukwan, Alaska, a Chinese feast in Clarksdale, Mississippi, an Uzbek dinner in Kansas City, Missouri, and many more.

(Sheila Spores holding a platter of grilled wild Alaska king and coho salmon at the home of our dinner host, Peter Rice, in Ketchikan)

Outside my office at NPR, I’ve hung a laminated map of the U.S., and I’ve marked our travel routes to date with a black Sharpie. It’s satisfying to look at the ground we’ve covered, but it’s also a constant reminder that there’s so much more territory to explore. The road beckons.

--Melissa Block

(Photos: Melissa Block/NPR)